Every time Nintendo is about to release a new console, rumours and wishful thinking emerge suggesting that the Kyoto giant is about to unleash some seriously powerful hardware and blow us away with a photorealistic Zelda game. Only to realise once again that Nintendo has chosen to go its own way.
In an interview with The Game Business, former Nintendo of America boss Reggie Fils-Aime comments on this, saying that Nintendo is not interested in battling Sony over blockbuster games:
"Let's be clear, Nintendo, in my opinion, will never position themselves as a direct competitor to PlayStation. It's not in their DNA. It's not how they think about the business opportunity.
"Nintendo, as it thinks about its hardware, it doesn't think through how I'm going to get the absolute latest graphics chip, the latest processing chip, that's not how they think about it. But the chip set of Switch 2 can do quite a lot. And so, it's in the middleware, it's in the education to the third-party."
Unlike its significantly weaker predecessor, Switch 2 has fairly decent performance, and now games are starting to arrive that are quite demanding but are still rendered by the console with impressive results, not least Cyberpunk 2077 and the upcoming Final Fantasy VII: Remake Intergrade.
Fils-Aime believes that Nintendo has incredible developers who really optimise the hardware in the best possible way, something that is particularly noticeable in how little storage space their titles require. He believes that Nintendo should share this expertise regarding its own hardware:
"One of the things that always amazed me is how efficient Nintendo developers are with their games. Big games like Tears of the Kingdom, when you look at the size of the game, the actual file size is about half of what another developer would do. And it's just in the efficiency that Nintendo is able to get out of its systems, and that efficiency is what they need to share with third-party developers so that their best content... maybe not the latest version, but, you know, half a step behind, could make its way onto Switch 2 and be quite successful."
What do you think, will high-end games for Switch 2 be able to become as big as those for PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, and does it seem like a good idea for Nintendo to try to teach third parties how to best optimise for Switch 2?